Erik Runeson

Labor costs is probably the main difference. This also includes skipping on quality control, not being too careful when selecting wood, etc. On dirt-cheap ($100) guitars, the hardware and wood is very low quality. You'll find flimsy tuners, bridges that will wear out quickly, plywood bodies etc. However, if you step the price up just a bit (say to $300) you can sometimes find instruments where the primary difference to a similar US made instrument is price.

That works for tone controls, but not for volume controls. With an 1M pot you get a bit more treble with the pot at max. However, you also get more noise, and since you get a bigger series resistance the capacitance of the cable will work against you even more and you'll get more treble loss when turning down the volume. So, no such thing as a "free lunch"

Ok, I have this worn-out Epiphone Les Paul that I haven't played in ages. It just felt awkward to play and I've considered scrapping it and using it for routing practice or as a general experimentation platform. After getting some inspiration for the cleaning tutorials here on Project Guitar, I finally took the time to cleanup the neck. Just removed all the crust around the frets, cleaned it up and wiped some lemon oil onto it. Suddenly, it's like a whole new guitar! It's really playable! Just one of those, perhaps-I-should-listen-to-advice-more-often moments... I wonder what happens if I cleanup my other guitars... It's still has catastrophic tuners, a worn-out bridge and the worst sunburst I've seen in a commercial guitar, but now it seems like a good candidate for a revival project, rather than firewood. New hardware and perhaps a new finish could turn it into something really useful.

Thanks a lot! This was exactly the kind of info I was looking for!

I'm playing around a bit trying to simulate different types of guitar tone controls using SwCAD/LTSpice. I'm interested in the frequency response of anything from dead simple (Volume + Tone), to really complex (Varitone, TBX). Trying to find some ideas on how to mod my guitars. I've made some successful simulation of tube amps using the models from Duncan Amps, so I'm familiar with the basics. On an amp simulation, the impedance of the input signal is not very important since the amp has a very high imput impedance. However, with passive guitar tone controls, the impedance plays a big part. If the impedance is not correct, the result will be way off. Has anyone made such simulations? I'd be very happy if you could give me some hints!